Low-budget auteur Ed Wood is best known for his work on such films as Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of the Monster, and Glen Or Glenda, but the director also spent a good portion of his career penning porno novels for seedy publishers. And next week, a collection of Wood's rare X-rated fiction will be on display in New York.

Here's the assessment of Wood's novel-writing days from the gallery show, "Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks":

The antiquarian mystique surrounding Edward Davis Wood Jr.'s career as an author of pornographic pulp fiction is legend. He wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, books were published and re-published under different titles, and occasionally under different author names. Multiple authors would share the same pseudonym, and the companies that published the titles weren't the kind of operations that kept any kind of records, nor paid royalties, nor really existed in the manner that most are to expect of book publishers.

The paperbacks are truly rare, even in an age of mass-searchable used book engines, and google ferocity. Ed Wood's sleaze fiction is also as strange, idiosyncratic and out of step with his times and mores as his infamous movies. Wood would write porn inter-spliced with lengthy philosophical, sociological and psychological discourse, he'd write first person narratives of life as a transvestite in the buttoned up America of the 1950's. He'd riff on psychosexual themes, and unleash his id, his ego and his superego in turn, sometimes in the same chapter. He'd write about sex and the human condition without veneer or filters, offering up the damaged and anguished voice of a desperately soul-searching drunk with a sense of self-worth that would stand in dichotomy to his self-pity.

His descent into alcoholism and poverty was mirrored by the publishers that employed him. Towards the end of his life he wrote pornography with decreasing amounts of the strange flourishes of his eccentric personality. He died in 1978 of an alcohol-induced heart attack. His friends say the porn killed him.